CUBING: House of Leaves
By Duy Tano
Last year, while on vacation, I took with me a copy of Mark
Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves,
which I picked up based on a recommendation by my favorite comic book writer,
Alan Moore.
Quickly flipping through the book, it would have been easy
to call it pretentious. I mean, this is one of the pages!
There are, in essence, two main stories in House of Leaves. I'll do my best to sum
it up, but keep in mind that there's no doing this justice.
The book starts off with our narrator, Johnny Truant, a
seemingly normal guy, finding a bunch of articles, artifacts, and other pieces
of writing by a man called Zampano. These artifacts relate to something called "The
Navidson Record," a documentary released by Miramax about a family, the
Navidsons, who move into a house that is bigger inside than it is outside, with
a hallway that constricts and expands seemingly of its own volition. The pieces
of writing are of an academic nature—critical analysis, transcripts of
interviews, interpretations of the film—and Johnny Truant is trying to put
them together in some sort of chronological order. But something happens while
he's doing it—Johnny slowly goes insane. Or maybe he already was from the
start.
See, "The Navidson Record" doesn't exist in this
world. No one has ever heard of it, and yet there are all these documents about
it. So what's up? Johnny leaves footnotes throughout the documents, some of
them taking up more space than the Navidson story, and he's the very definition
of an unreliable narrator.
It seemed like something college-age me would have eaten up,
but adult me wouldn't have had the patience for.
And yet, reading it, I couldn't really put it down. I think,
partly, it's because I'm primarily a reader of comic books. I'm attracted to
the visual aspect of it, being able to move my eyes around and taking in the
whole page, and I'm also just in general used to being able to turn the page at
a quicker pace than I would if I were reading a straightforward prose novel. House of Leaves plays to both of those.
There's also the factor of just not knowing what the hell is
going on. Seriously, what's going on? What happened to Zampano? What's the deal
with this house? When they get to the chapter explaining what the house is, it's
all full of Xs and black spots, either because Zampano crossed it out or Johnny
spilled black ink over it or. . . whatever else. Why is the word "house"
always in blue? Why is the word "minotaur" always in red, and why is
it crossed out every time? What's with the (seeming) mistakes and typographical
errors (at one point, Zampano or Johnny refers to Will Navidson's brother Tom
in the first person). Is Johnny actually going insane or has he always been
insane? What's with the Whalestoe Letters, published in the appendix, from
Johnny's mom Pelafina, sent from her mental institution, and what are the
secret codes hidden in it? Does one of them really show that she knew Zampano
before Johnny had ever heard of him?
These questions are all left open, a very postmodern
approach, and have spawned a lot of theories and websites—including a theory
that posits that Danielewski did it all on purpose to spawn theories and
websites, because the book is, in a way, satirizing or parodying overanalysis.
And that's a valid point because, the thing is, you can enjoy the book without knowing the answers.
That's why I couldn't put the book down. Built with
different pieces of writing and different artifacts, not unlike Bram Stoker's Dracula, you got everything you needed
to enjoy the Navidson Record. You didn't need to know all the answers. Will
(Navy to his friends) sets out to explore this house, and the expanding
five-minute hallway in it. He recruits his friends, it affects his family, his partner
Karen Green (who's afraid of the dark) leaves him because of it, but he just
cannot stop looking.
When he finally goes to explore the house on his own, the
book just falls apart. Words are published diagonally, randomly, in all sorts
of orders. Some pages only have one word on them; some have only fragments of a
word. It's a device that could easily be dismissed as trying too hard, but as a
result, it's a real page-turner. When Navy goes into the house and cannot
control where he's going, neither can we, the readers.
At the end of it all, Navy makes it out of the house (that's
not a spoiler; it's pretty much stated from the beginning), but what state is
he in? What emotions follow? What saves him? The answers, the story, they
engage you on a visceral level, just as much as the structure of the book makes
you think that it will engage you on
a cerebral one.
And that's why I couldn't put House of Leaves down, because for all of the questions it asks (how
does Navy take a copy of a book called House
of Leaves with the exact same number of pages as the actual book House of Leaves with him?) and doesn't
answer (Did Johnny really kill that guy?), for all the footnotes and addendums
and appendices, for all the obscure hints, like the insertion of Yggdrassil,
the World Ash Tree, at the very end there, and for all the flipping around you
have to do, when distilled, it's actually a pretty straightforward story about
the various kinds of love, and how each kind—like Navy's love of adventure—can affect others—like his love for his family.
And maybe that's the point Danielewski was trying to make at
the end of it all. For all the speculation, maybe the answers that truly matter
are all in front of us.
Or maybe not. It's not like I majored in English.
You can read House of Leaves by purchasing it at Amazon.com.
Or maybe not. It's not like I majored in English.
You can read House of Leaves by purchasing it at Amazon.com.
Duy Tano is a popular Internet blogger and
comic book expert. Check out his blog, The Comics Cube!, at www.comicscube.com,
which tackles all sorts of different topics for all sorts of different forms of
sequential art. Superhero comics, indie comix, komiks, manga, BD—you
name it, it's a valid topic for discussion.
Labels: Alan Moore, comics, Cubing, Duy Tano, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
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